Who am I and how did I get here?

I was leaning out of the window so the cigarette smoke would drift outside. This only ever works to an imperfect degree, as any secret smoker will testify, but my two young children would be too busy to notice the smell on return from nursery and school while my partner of thirteen years - who I’ll call Dave as testimony to his love of Cameron - had no discernible sense of smell. I flicked the ash and watched it spiral down the three storeys to ground level and one more for the basement. Presumably it landed somewhere in front of my Tory supporting neighbour’s front door. Not polite but hardly enough to start a great conflagration, I told myself, as I flicked and flicked.

Jump. Go on, just fucking jump.

I smoked another. I’m not really much of a smoker. When bad things happen I rush off to the newsagent’s and get a pack of ten menthols of any old brand and a pint of milk to cover my tracks. The last time I made the guy fish through all the packets to find one with a written health warning as opposed to a graphic image (too much for me in my current state of mind). I generally smoke the first while I circle the small park where I live, keeping a sharp eye out for the first floor neighbour who practically lives there, taking care not to mutter and mumble. Usually I’ll follow with a seamless second before trotting home with a cheery “I’m back!”. By the evening or the next day a ball of tobacco grunge has taken residence in the pit of my stomach like a heaving ball of sick and at this point the rest of the pack goes in the bin, only to be replaced by another ten-pack whenever the next bad thing occurs.

I leant out of the window and looked around. A neighbour, the father of my daughter’s friend, was going down the pavement outside the school where he taught. For reasons I never cared to ask, he has been in a wheelchair the whole time I have known him. You should be ashamed, I told myself, wanting to jump from this window and maim your body down there on the street. What would that guy make of you if he heard. He would think you were such an ungrateful prat.

I visualised a swastika-like arrangement of head and limbs, by no means necessarily dead, or more likely a haystack-shaped pile of blood and guts waiting for the Tory supporter like a bird carcass left as a little present from a loving cat. No no, I told myself as I drew back from the window. No way am I dying down there. If I am going to leave my sloppy corpse as a little present for any man, I know exactly the man and I know his address too.

Fear not. I am too afraid of heights to have believed even for a moment that I would really make it over the balcony, but nonetheless the return of the “jump” impulse shook me deeply. “Jump” hadn’t been around for a couple of weeks and I had dared to hope it had gone away. But no, it was back and hanging in the air like a rotting vegetable smell.

Back inside, the sight of the computer screen made me sick, horrible sick like a particularly insidious motion sickness from reading comics in the car even when your mum says not to. (“I told you!” she proclaims as you vom all over six months’ worth of the Desperate Dan, expected back by the lot next door before the end of the week.) I would have liked to go to the bathroom and throw; but I knew it would not come and I lacked the skill to make it come even after many practice sessions of poking away at the back of my throat, desperately trying to imagine oral sex with some horrible guy in an attempt to make the retching feel more real.

I made myself a rum and coke. I’m pretty sure that when my employer’s physician told me to take some time off at home and rest, a return to adolescent-style forays into self abuse was far from her mind. But when you’re labouring under obsessive love, it is no toxic substance but rather the computer from which you have most to fear.

Who am I and how did I get here? These are the questions I aim to answer. I’ll write it down as I go along in case I fall under a bus or more likely a police car or in case I do one day find it in myself to shuffle my flab off ledge or bridge. It’s not the romantic comic novel I had hoped to write but I see now that it isn’t in me to write anything else. You could task me to write anything, from a shopping list to a letter to the Times, and this is what you would get.

Maybe by the time I get there I’ll have worked out a better ending, something more positive - redemptive even - from which others can draw inspiration and hope. Then my collected blogs could get published and even adapted for the big screen starring Katy Perry and Russell Brand. Maybe.